2 Email Address Capture Tools To Build Your List

Use Hello Bar and OptinMonster To Collect Email Addresses

To leverage the power of email marketing, you first need an email address capture strategy.

Take your cue from social media. They use email keep you returning to their platforms with mailings notifying you of recent developments.

Content Marketing Institute’s Joe Pulizzi focuses on the growth of his email list as an indicator of business health. (He discusses this in his book Content Inc. Check his author interview on Actionable Marketing Guide.)

Even better, the list size improves new email registrants by providing social proof.

Minimize the amount of information requested and offer an incentive, either content or a discount, to get readers to sign up.

2 Email Address Capture Tools

To help you increase your email address capture, we’ll examine 2 tools the Actionable Marketing uses: Hello Bar and OptinMonster. Both help you get your visitors’ attention at just the right time without annoying them.

BTW, Hello Bar was developed by Neil Patel and OptinMonster was developed by Syed Balkhi. We highly recommend reading their blogs and following them on social media.

1. How to use Hello Bar for email address capture

Hello Bar places a bar across the top of your web pages with a call-to-action message, a submit button and optionally an input field. There’s a easy-to-use editor for creating the bars and setting options controlling where and when they appear.

Hello Bar provides 4 types of bars:

Capture email addresses.

Link to a landing page.

Provide social media connections.

Display a message.

The first screenshot shows the choices:

Styles are set in the second panel. As you edit and change options, a preview screen changes to show what the bar will look like on your website. The preview screen has a nice feature: you can switch from desktop to mobile views.

You can add URL rules to select or exclude pages and posts. For example, Actionable Marketing Guide excludes the bar from the front page of our website where we believe it can be annoying. It currently promotes Social Media Marketing World 2016, where Heidi Cohen is presenting. When we switch back to a bar asking visitors to sign up for our weekly newsletter, we’ll exclude the bar from appearing on the landing page for signups.

After completing the 5 steps and publishing your Hello Bar, you received a snippet of code and instructions explaining how to add the code to your website. Hello Bar can be added to any kind of website. WordPress admins can install a plugin that will place the snippet in the appropriate place.

The Hello Bar dashboard displays your campaigns, the number of views and conversions broken out in useful ways along with suggestions for improvements.

Hello Bar provides 3 service tiers:

Plan

Features

Cost

Basic

Limit of 10 bars

HelloBar logo on all content

3 improve suggestions

Hello Bar ads shown to 1 of every 10 visitors

FREE

Pro

Unlimited bars, Unbranded content

Custom thank you message

Behavior activated content

10 improve suggestions

Custom targeted content

$12/moAfter 250,000 visits, every 25,000 visits are $5 extra

Enterprise

All the benefits of Pro

Future improvements

Unlimited visits

Enterprise integrations

$83/mo

Actionable Marketing Tool Tips

Give you readers a few moments to scan your webpage before the Hello Bar appears. If they aren’t interested in the page’s content, they’re unlikely to follow the bar’s call-to-action. But don’t wait too long or they’ll resent being interrupted in their reading.

Disable the “Show Toolbar when viewing site” option (if your website is built on WordPress). When you’re signed in to WordPress, the Toolbar will cover the Hello Bar.

Actionable Marketing Guide publishes new posts from 2 to 5 times each week. You will receive a summary of each new post from “Heidi Cohen”. The email’s subject line will begin “Actionable Marketing Guide” followed by the title of the new post.

One Response to 2 Email Address Capture Tools To Build Your List

I like the idea of Hello Bar since I’m not really fond of throwing things up in my visitors’ faces… but, do you think it’s as effective as a traditional lightbox popup? I suppose I just need to test it and find out.